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Eight Places You Need to Visit and Understand Chicago’s Black Freedom Struggle

Go to Montgomery, Alabama today and markers to the civil rights movement dot the city landscape: Dr. King’s house, the place where Rosa Parks was arrested, homes of other activists like E.D. Nixon and Georgia Gilmore, the site where the 1960 Freedom Riders were attacked. But come to Chicago and the markers to the city’s civil rights movement are few and far between–despite an incredibly robust freedom movement and a level of segregation that Dr King termed one of the “most segregated” in the nation in 1963.

In Marquette Park, there is a beautiful artist-designed memorial where civil rights marchers were assaulted by white mobs in the summer of 1966 but no mention of city officials’ long-standing attempts to keep the city segregated. The National Park Service has given landmark status to the Chicago church where teenager Emmett Till’s casket, lynched in Mississippi, was opened for the world to see. But the site of 17-year-old Chicago teenager Jerome Huey’s lynching that occurred in the city in 1966, the 1963 school boycott, and the slum apartment the Kings lived in remain unmarked.

This Southernification of King and the civil rights movement is a more comfortable tale. It erases the systemic, longstanding segregation and racial inequality endemic in Northern cities and marginalizes the robust, years-long movement in Chicago that Martin Luther King supported and then helped expand with the SCLC in 1965—movements that were ignored, dismissed, or demonized by most white Chicagoans, city leaders, and the federal government at the time. To tell that Northern story, to mark those places and reckon with that history, uncovers a more necessary if unsettling truth about this country.

Too often Northern racism and segregation are, as they were sixty years ago, dismissed as not systemic, a product of people’s preferences to live in communities that are not integrated. But even a glimpse of the history shows how city leaders, school officials, real estate interests, and outright violent racists colluded to maintain segregation and inequality in cities like Chicago.

Mayor Richard J. Daley’s home, ​​3536 South Lowe Avenue in Bridgeport. Elected mayor in 1955 and serving until he died in 1976, Daley would persistently deny the city’s segregation and, as persistently, work to maintain it, including in his own all-white neighborhood of Bridgeport. The mayor backed the building of massive housing projects to contain Black people including the segregated, seventeen-story Stateway Gardens and twenty-eight-story, 30-block-long Robert Taylor Homes projects. Stunned by the intensity of segregation, Martin Luther King called them “cement reservations”: Coretta, “upright concentration camps.”

The construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway was slated to go through Bridgeport but Daley changed the route so the expressway swerved into........

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